Stuart Greenberg was at the top of his profession: a renowned forensic psychologist who in court could determine which parent got custody of a child, or whether a jury believed a claim of sexual assault. Trouble is, he built his career on hypocrisy and lies,
and as a result, he destroyed lives, including his own...

The
child custody evaluator in this example, Stuart A. Greenberg, a Washington
doctorate-level MHP (Ph.D., ABPP), was widely hailed as one of the top
forensic child custody evaluators in the United States (and also known
as one who charged some of the most expensive fees). In July 2007, he was
caught
after concocting a setup in the women's bathroom in his office that enabled
him to secretly videotape female employees, patients, and members of the
general public as they used the toilet. He was arrested after videotaping
an employee and masturbating to that. Some weeks later, he committed suicide.
Numerous mothers subjected to his custody evaluations were gouged by exhorbitant
and inflated fees, libeled by his reports (some losing custody), and made
to suffer intrusive and detailed irrelevant questioning about their sex
lives with which they had no choice but to cooperate because of the threat
of losing custody of their children and other court-ordered sanctions.

Friend states that he has also received a telephone
call from the respondent's wife "Marsha" and that she was only
able to ask him "why hadn't he gone to her first?"

Custody litigant: mother: the respondent "always
made her feel uncomfortable" as "everything she said he
seemed to relate to something sexual"... "everything the
respondent asked or talked about all seemed to return to sex."

Woman employee, a MHP, had a "weird feeling about
him" and that was especially true when he interacted with other
female employees... the thing that disturbs her most about this incident
is that not only did she use the bathroom, but every single day extremely
vulnerable clients, the public, patients and their family members all used
this bathroom and were obviously being recorded by the respondent.

Woman employee, a MHP, always got a "weird
vibe" from the respondent, who has "creeped her out."

(One of the woman
employees, subsequently a videotape victim herself, never came to the defense
of a woman custody litigant, who Greenberg decided was "histrionic"
when she objected to his privacy-invasive questions):

"...I'd raised
concerns about the inappropriateness of his asking a LOT of questions about
my sex life during his interview with me... It felt weird and uncomfortable
to me, threw me off during the interview, and then I didn't have enough
time to talk about my concerns about my abusive husband. [Greenberg's associate
Jennifer Wheeler, Ph.D, who participated in the evaluation] actually included
my mention of that incident into their report as evidence that I was "histrionic."
They asked the court for two RCW restrictions
against me, as opposed to only one for my husband. One for abusive use
of conflict stemming from the court ordering supervised visitation and
an unspecified as well as unsubstantiated personality disorder (among other
things that I was histrionic and unbelievable) that made me a "danger
to my child" My husband, who beat me unconscious and bleeding (15
stitches on the face), just lost his temper the one time and was a really
nice, honest fellow who was taking responsibility..." [private
interview with liz]

The associate-in-training went right along with
Greenberg's nonsense. (Why? Did she really believe this is the way to decide
child custody cases? Did she believe her boss/mentor's assessment? Did
she not have a clue herself? Or was it just a matter of career opportunism,
as I suspect it is with much of the therapeutic jurisprudence crowd.) The
notes including the sex questions were not provided to the litigant as
requested in discovery; the litigant was informed that they would cost
her an additional $700. Outrageous.

Disciplinary
file. A complaint filed in 2002 by another woman who was financially
gouged by unreasonable fees was closed because, apparently, it did not
involve sufficient fees to make it worth the Board's time.

There were numerous
prior disciplinary files against Greenberg, others involving his practices
and ethics, bias. They were all closed, mostly speciously as far as we
can tell with the benefit of hindsight, without any serious investigations,
and sealed from adequate public disclosure.

On
July 6, 2007, apparently right after being arrested, Greenberg sent a letter
to the board of psychology ("Board") resigning "for health
reasons... effective immediately". What was the urgency? Did he not
know he was impaired prior to his arrest? This is the sort of action a
lawyer might advise as a defense, to moot further investigations by the
Board of other facts and complaints that would not necessarily rise to
a level of criminal behavior but could result in continuing news coverage
and ultimately civil liability. Not exactly apologetic at this point. The
Board stamped the letter as received on July 11, 2007. But then, interestingly,
it nevertheless proceeded with its investigation and complaint, summarily
suspending Greenberg from practice on an emergency basis for the
public welfare, for a proposed period of 20 years. What was the Board's
new urgency? The apparent continual telephoning by Seattle news reporters?
Or someone's knowledge that perhaps the Board needed to rectify its prior
negligent or lax investigations of complaints? I don't know; I'm speculating
and wondering.

This
work is part of ongoing research being conducted by the National Network
on Family Law Policy, with the assistance of numerous scholars, professionals,
and others who are investigating the workings of our justice system. For
more information, contact sarah,

LIZNOTE: What
is most horrifying about this case is that this custody evaluator, Stuart
A. Greenberg, Ph.D., was not just some local yokel easily dismissed as
an aberration. Rather, this prolific author of how-to materials, and articles,
and presenter at industry seminars on the subject of "ethics"
and procedures in child custody evaluations, including evaluating of child
sexual abuse, was (and inexplicably still is) hailed as a great teacher,
mentor, example, and leader in the relatively newly-invented field of forensic
child custody evaluation by some of the top child custody evaluators in
the APA and AFCC.

Were this man's transgressions
merely an anomalous few pages in an otherwised unblemished journal of life?

Were this man's transgressions
merely of the sort that could be dismissed as a couple of isolated acts
in his old age, some kind of spontaneous stumble into a newly sprung temptation,
perhaps from stress or whoknowswhat -- as many of his friends and cohorts
now publicly profess? Are these the sorts of things one does when he is
depressed from... his heart medication?

Aw, come on... Read the police
reports and related documents. Even if it were reasonable to believe that
someone, in this case a psychologist, one day all of a sudden could become
a sex pervert and against his own better judgment find himself unable to
resist the temptation (that normal temptation that ostensibly tempts us
all?) of engaging in a complicated, premeditated act of setting up a remote
camera to create his own fetishistic pornography in order to relieve the
depression he didn't know how to alleviate... there's too much other evidence
"in retrospect" that something was wrong. These were the acts
of a guy who just wasn't getting off any more on intrusive questioning,
power mongering, and gawdknowswhatelse, while he sat in judgment for years
making recommendations of dubious
value about other people's lives and children, and making unusually grand
(or grandiose?) fees for doing so. (..." everything
the respondent asked or talked about all seemed to return to sex.")
Like the guy who is caught speeding, or cheating... that's "the
one time it was caught", not "the once".

Given the widespread, continuing
state of denial by professionals in the field who knew him, either with
incredible naivety or to throw up self-protective diversionary smoke screens
(doubting all facts and theories when it's expedient to do so, as they
do when allegations of the sort they don't like are made in custody cases),
I felt it important to put up this web page with FOIA documents and other
materials, and make them available, so that the facts cannot be brushed
under the rug as the biased complaints of disgruntled and personality-disordered
parents.

Is a man not known by the
company he keeps? Where is the outrage of the "helping
professionals"? Egoistically tsk-tsking, secretly gossipping among
themselves, calling it all "sad", and empathizing with his wife
and family (but not the vulnerable and already-troubled litigants who may
have been devastated by his actions, not the woman who was beat unconscious
and required fifteen stitches and then instead of getting help through
the justice system, subjected by Greenberg to interrogation about her sex
life and labeled "histrionic"), scavenging for Greenberg's materials,
forms, questionnaires, unfinished articles, and the like, would be my guess.

Understand -- it's not that
I'm unsympathetic to a fucked-up individual who doesn't want to be and
can't control his obsessions. But just as we temper our sympathy for alcoholics
who get into a car and drive drunk, placing others at risk, my sympathy
wanes when an individual who knew better, knew he was a dysfunctional and
disturbed man, knew his judgment about others could not possibly be competent
because of that (and in fact wrote what he must have known was horseshit
in some of his reports), continued to do -- and promote others doing --
this "forensic" work anyway, all the while charging ridiculous
fees (which we can surmise were another part of his motivation).

And, more importantly,
it's not Stuart Greenberg who is the issue or actual subject matter here;
he is only the example -- an example that went undetected for decades
and might have remained that way. I suspect that Stuart Greenberg is no
aberration. There are more than a few in this field who "give me weird
vibes" and tend to "creep me out" in the MHP professional
vernacular (above) for one reason or another, and
whose motivations I suspect range from financial opportunism, to personality
disorders, to sex perversions, to substance abuse and pornography addictions,
to misogynistic attitudes, to personal histories they need to normalize
in their own minds, and axes to grind, to just plain old arrogant stupidity
and ignorance, not infrequently projecting their own issues onto others
(seecustody
evaluator quotes). Greenberg is the tip of the iceberg.

Regarding motivation: we
all know that individuals tend to go into fields of work that for one reason
or another hold special interest for them. This applies to all kinds of
professions. Often, the attraction is because something in the subject
matter appeals to the individual, whether gardening or law or medicine,
sometimes the individual gravitates into a field because of special talents,
such as writing, or speaking, or singing or sports, or because of particular
aspects of the field such as the hours, or travel opportunities, or financial
opportunities, curiosity (the scientist), as well as plain old interest
in the subject matter. Sometimes those interests mesh with a chosen field
because of a particular personality attribute of the individual, such as
the desire to be around, or conversely, avoid working with other people,
or animals, or a desire for fame (author), or applause (actor), or for
power (politics, CEO), or some kind of savior complex (law enforcement,
the military), or a desire to work outdoors, or indoors... Sometimes a
field of endeavor is chosen because it's the family business, or is "just
a job" because the person couldn't think of something else to do and
had no particular talents or interests that moved him but needs to pay
the bills. Motivations affect us all. Usually there is more than one motivator,
but the motivators are not always all innocuous. We know, for example,
that pedophiles gravitate into fields in which they will have contact with
children, thus, ironically, making these fields -- pediatric nursing, daycare
worker, teacher, clergy -- more likely to have higher percentages of workers
who are dangerous to children. The child's playground is a milieu that
will appeal more to the pedophile than will the conference room table on
the 43rd floor...

So it's fair to ask what
motivates someone -- someone who clearly had the talent and ability to
do other things, and who who didn't fall into his job by happenstance --
to choose to judge other people and meddle with their families and lives.
And pontificate regularly on the ethics of it, no less. Perhaps we could
say that someone such as a former business litigator who now finds himself
on the family law bench might have "fallen into" the job. We
could say that the pediatrician who is an expert witness on rare occasion
didn't set out to do this for his daily bread. Ditto the legitimate scientist
or actual research scholar who does the occasional forensic analysis (but
query re the ones who become akin to professional witnesses aka "whores
of the court").

What motivates individuals
first to decide as youth to study psychology, and then to specialize in
psychological issues involving child abuse or sexual dysfunction, and then
-- especially as to those with a pro-defense bias that didn't move them
in the first place into the field of law -- market themselves in positions
of power and authority where they can meddle in some of the most private,
intimate and important aspects of others' lives -- their family relationships,
their sexual relationships, the custody and upbringing of their children?
What percentage in this field are drunk with their own power, exercising
it cavalierly because of the immunized, unaccountable authority granted
to them by the misguided "therapeutic jurisprudence" ideas, and
secretly satisfying their own issues and perversions.

Don't you think we ought
to be looking at the motivations and likely
biases and ulterior
agendas of these individuals with at least a little of the suspicion
they routinely heap disdainfully on parents in custody cases, especially
protective mothers?

It doesn't matter WHAT the
protocols are. It doesn't matter how unbiased the examiner. It doesn't matter
how copious the information gathered or how conscientious the assessment. For
getting at the "truth", it absolutely doesn't matter how much training the
evaluator has in domestic violence, feminism, fathers' perspectives, or abuse
defense. All the training does is create a belief bias.
The general public -- and this includes judges -- need to be educated that
there is very little expertise in forensic or applied psychology. There is no
predictive power. There is absolutely no way to take sociological surveys
about groups of individuals -- and this includes psychological testing -- and apply any of it to one individual. At best,
we have insightful guesses. But training in psychology does not improve insight; those who go into the field
frequently do so because they are people who already have problems and lack the insight to figure them out.
And the training itself is as likely as not to diminish this cognitive function as
its practitioners learn to deny their own flawed human cognitive
synthesizing in order to substitute an even worse rote protocol under the
pretext of neutral scientific investigation.
There is no science. There is no falsifiable unifying theory with causation and prediction. There is no expertise. There is only familiarity with
the presumptions, protocols and lingo of the field, just as one would find
with "expertise" in astrology. No matter how expertly mapped, or with what
nuance and consideration of all relevant details, the positions of the stars
still say absolutely nothing about anything. -- liz

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